15 Master Virgil's Deceyte, Duncan McGibbon [highly recommended books .TXT] 📗

image
with a cunning so confident, so self-reliant
to tangle experience in a scheme
while the prisoner is taken down to jubilant.

cheers in the audience scaled in rows.
to be counted still distant and distracted,
escorted from the shadows
among Pascal’s tranquil recollected.

10.The Reign of Beasts

Experience’s verdict
is waited on by the press
though easy to predict..
Idea, a hostile witness
suspends belief, giving
evidence to greet
thought’s entangling,
yet she’s a cheat
with eyes askant
on Emmanuel Kant.

 
11.In The Custody of Ghosts

Experience accepts ,come what may,
knowing the world cannot run any other way
Experience could have got way with it,
kept her feelings in,said nothing
about the jealousy in her orbit
She with her country living

squalid with kids and Rousseau for solace
and Miss Inspiration with only
a family photo, a flat in commonplace
a by-passed heart so lonely

and surrogate births, yet experience gets into bother
They fight bare-kniuckled, wrestling on the earth
to keep the peace, Hume bound both over.


12.In the Critic’s Chambers

Dr Thought, a phenomenon in his time
will examine pure experience.
His Ideal mind will judge whether
to suspend her life sentence.
While experience smiles readily,
knowing practice doubts her sanity.

13.The Business of Images

Whatever happened to experience
she turns up in a routine town
trying to be alive without pretence.
Inspiration tracked her down
Now back among the guilty
she only goes where guards allow
Are we safe in our bower,
Herr Schopenhauer
where our loved ones are now?

14.The Property of Shadows

Images bring experience
before her chosen critics,
a jury that never relents
for murder and other tricks

of Corporal Reality, an acrobat
of no fixed address, or site
the images somehow know that
she’d escape into the night.

so Hegel let her free. She’s run,
sensing what poets want
and images make fears to shun
her guilt, while in an unseen font
a finger scratches, writing
in the arena’s sand,
a script without an ending.

15.The Language of Uptake

Back to their day job
poetry and image return
and bow and hob nob
through their theatrical turn
before the footlights
and the circus-horde.
While back on nights
wriggling hands
through a board,
experience lies in the logic box
an elaborate palmistry
of performance and paradox
no poetry of risk and mystery
or customary song and disappears
with thought’s identity
to expose dread Wittgenstein’s fears,
her rival for reality’s heart.

16. The Get-away.

The soldier
who’s older
had already
told her.
“Be steady.”

Mia leapt into the mirror’s world
There was a loud splash, more,

as she parted the meniscus, hurled
off the floor. Before the hole
stood her shadow, furled
for action, burnt onto the tiles
Mia swam in a dark room,
filled with alcohol that files
her to a specimen tomb.
Every dream in her soul's
physiognomy’s outlined doom
under perforated rolls
a pre-established womb
in sepia ink rattles into print,
labelled on a quadrilateral card.
filed to a password with no hint.

Soon she stood up, unscarred
dry on an unlit floor, unmarred.


 


Touching the Strings
Matutinals

1. At the Bus-Stop

Her hair is dark. Her little ringlets
fleshed by olive, almost gold-hued skin.
Her eyes are the friends of ravens
and the pupillage of coal.
"No I've just come," she says,
showing teeth, like fresh milk
on a dairy cart’s shelf.
I laugh. An unseen bus
threatens to pass us. I flag it down
And let her on ahead of me.
She smiles and gives her small frame
grace with a quick oppositional bow
her slight form grown a valuable thing
when cultured with such care.
She gets out with the shop- girls
in the town. Her parting look, a pain
like a jolt against the funny bone
come down hard on emptiness.

2. In the Bus

You look at me
from those wide-open eyes,
Your hair a reddish
angry dawn
and your enquiring smile,
a naked clock.3.At the Station

It is the evasion makes it clear.
Others, more polished, notice it
and try to make up, blunder
across her careful tactics:
That round, full face ,devout
with innate beauty, will turn
when asked and make amends
for a smudged first meeting
with that wary, self-denying smile
as if to say "I am too busy
looking for a self to own one yet.
Accept my case notes for
a small project on friendship."

4 On the train

That study in black
which fashion's forced upon us.
is contradicted by the style
in which you perch
against the edgeof the seat.
Sideways on, I see the roots of fire
that burn beneath your restless figure
a volcanic island whose ruler
lures the tourist loser into towns
that quickly burn objective artifacts
cameos, notebooks, instruments
into fruitless, accounted ash.
As you took your coat off you could see
the verses I was writing in my book
with quick deft movements of your eyes,my signature on a bankrupt cheque.

5 At the Barrier

To meet you now so pale,
despite your hair's electricals,
like you don’t care,
bound up so stroppily with combs
is to discern the sudden,
unasked-for pain of notice
so carelessly blazoned
in those so hautily-crimsoned lips,
like you don’t care?


Metathalamion 1

When I first heard about the big, new house
with its walls the colour of autumn and pomegranates,
I thought all I’d lived for had come true again,
but once when he was out all day at work
I opened the letter about redemption
and saw how the cost had added up,
allowing a place still for him and her,
some flat, or a house where he would visit
and have the kind of nonsense I never wanted,
about postures and games little boys play.
I would work on the next day, at nursing
which he disliked and wanted me to give it up,
He would think reluctance a kind of cruelty,
yet it was only stubborn protest that life allows us
only one chance to be the hero on the stage
and once we leave, someone has to hear auditions.
Now I lie here un-talking with this pain
of a dosage I have given to myself,
wanting no more twisted fiction.
Only to stop, not wanting a silent death
to bring me away from all this fantasy.
If I’m too late he’ll think of me for once
and if I live he’ll tell me what a fool I was
as I lie here trying to lure back my head,
I grieve for the girl, too young be some rival
and add her pain to the miasma of my maze..

Metathalamion II

I know I have taken him from you,
stalking him with my long legs, smelling
his earth of jealousy and arousal.
I will not bring him to my house.
I cannot have him passive, complicating
our closeness. I prefer the years of rooms
and weekends of staircases and flats that smell
of cleaner’s disinfectant and their fags.
We sail for France over a seascape
of remembered voices which only love
can cancel from the luggage of going on with it.
When I became a mother I preferred
my father’s mistress. Now I have you both,
the mutual complicity in oblivion of a love
that answers both your dreams and make mine real

Metathalamion III

Theirs was a Neo-Classical affair.
She was gold Corinthian among her
capital virtues, her elegent hair
always tied with a new ribbon
and her long neck with an even fillet.
He had a Spartan temperament
a pillar of strength among his order.
Their steps to the altar were perdictable
and their passions were smoothed to an even line.
She to her dance administration
and its scenic tempests with dramatic effect.
His to his Home Office career, white collars,
pin stripe and the columns of the Times
Then strangely the bonding seemed to stop.
Their balanced perspective failed them.
He found her frigid. She found him cold.
It all stopped to become a pale frieze
of civic expectations, pious sacrifices,
which they love in equal properties
and closed the entrances on Mausoleum hearts.


 
After the Gala.

Once, when for the gala at school,
he'd walked all morning long
to reach the swimming-pool.
the place his teacher knew, the one

that's dry and dead and boarded up.
He stayed behind for the slim
beautiful, assistant, a pup,
and watched her swim

with the Rugby trainer
who despised her French disdain,
despite the way she trained her
bottom à la Bardot, to claim

his curricular attention.
Yet hidden. he took note of her allure
and thought in which conjugation
he could express his love, so sure.

Now both are somewhere other,
he knows. The girl never loved him
and, yet he admits it, he loved her.
Life need not be so grim !

If he could find the case for time, not space
that's dry and dead, but tense and still a place.


The game proceeds
with every lover
finding a rival.
To those in business,
it could be the boss;
or those you spar with
for your daily fix;
whatever you want.
In her case it’s you.

Decide who’s for real
and who just isn’t.
Put the real person
outside the circle
of your thoughts and fears;
a good place to start.
Put the unreal one
inside the same place.
Then alternate them,

circling to a point
so the real unreal
and the unreal real,
the really unreal,
the unreally real
chase each oth
vanishes, to leave
the winner alone.

The game ends when you
might pass each other
and you can’t do that.
When I play this game,
I always choose you.
and I’m always left
holding and losing
the unreal unreal.

2.Cat and Mouse.

For this game you need
some fantasy to live in,
appointments and tears
connecting your life.

To start, find a place
of your own somewhere.
Lovers stand opposite,
as they do mostly
and then take turns;
one diary to the next.
Love can catch you if
it shares your page
To have a chance
make sure your moves
aren’t dumped in the margin.


 


The Shattered Lamp 
The Delivery of the Baboon Parts

Corpses in their mortuaries, post-coital lovers
all naked as babies at delivery, fail to rise
as I do now, , carrying the weight of the beast,
a thickening, dense, soul-beat in my blood.
Unlivened I live unchaste, I chasten
myself: all hair lines engaged,
while my daughters weave stories to offset suitors
and Telemachus growls and paces
the house like a Byronic mastiff.
Why am I restless again?
Here in this suburb of prizewinners,
the Times Atlases hold the blue skies aloft
on salaried columns. to the crackle of Radio 3,
the tantrums of lawn-mowers.
and the milk bottles’ consecration bells.
It is the Saturday migration to music lessons.
to ballet, or drama halls to the mutter of BMWs
while at the piano, the podgy hands
are bailed out by soft-peddling adults.
I am waiting for the postman
to deliver baboon-parts,
delivering me from this identity,
while I dictate taped messages
on the hazards of navigating Rockall,
a ruse to leave behind on
my departure for toy jungles.

My Last